8-year-old's Uzi death at gun show

[Adzma]

I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to blame video games about this.

"The weapon in question was unsafe because the 15 year old boy hosting the display played violent video games and hence sabotaged the sub-machine gun in order to cause harm to the 8 year old."

 

[paasi]

I?m from Massachusetts and love guns and remember when this happened. The kid couldn?t control the recoil and lost control of the gun, from stories at the time it sounded like it rocked back and shot him in the head. Nobody should have given this kid a gun if he couldn?t control it. In fact nobody should give an 8yr old anything that can go full auto. Jamming has nothing to do with him shooting himself?. jam = no boom

what a redneck approach. yeah. thats tragic. someone gave a 8 year old child a fully automatic weapon and left them to it.

there's the important bit: fully automatic.

smack your head into your desk repeatedly for being so fucking stupid.

A 8 YEAR OLD SHOULDN'T HAVE ANY TYPE OF WEAPON.

Why not?

Children in that age category are egocentric and cannot fully comprehend that creatures other than themselves are capable of feeling pain or similiar feelings, they also are in an emotionally developing stage and are susceptible to fits of rage.
Point is that they are in a developing stage at which they cannot completely understand the meaning of death, pain or other concepts associated with guns

Guns are unreasonably dangerous "tools" to be around anyone really.
In my opinion guns ought to be very restricted in manner such as:
- Owning a gun forbidden and permit unattainable for anyone under 18
- Permit for small calibre handguns and shotguns attainable only through a course on weapon handling and an examination performed by the police
- Permit for larger calibre handguns and rifles attainable only after a perole duration (2 years or so) after attaining small arms permit
- Membership to a Gun Association or military service record

If these were applied it'd be so much safer.

 

[cobra_ky]

Hahhaha, hilarious! Doubly hilarious with some of the commentary here!

Why not go to a gun show?
How is an art exhibit any more or less wrong for an 8 year old, considering guns kill far less children then the bus he had to take every day of his life?

This was a hilarious tragedy which is made even more hilarious because it will provoke people who don't think logically to say "well gosh, if only he hadn't been allowed near guns"!

Yes, guns are terrible instruments of life and death, but when we live in a world where the car is far more of a blood god than anything actually designed for destruction, the rules may just be a bit different from what your intuition tells you.

tl;dr: this wasn't sad or tragic at all.

how often does a fifteen year old bus driver turn the wheel over to an 8 year old?

That's what happens when you name your kid Bizilj.

...

Bizilj is their last name.

Again, according to child psychology, an eight year old can fully understand the consequences to potentially the same degree as the 15 year old (many 15 year olds are still in the concrete stage). Which sort of undermines your argument.

Not to mention, it was a controlled environment. You could have had a 2 year old shoot it with the same amount of risk as an 80 year old.

No, you absolutely couldn't, because a two-year old isn't strong enough to carry the weight of the weapon, let alone control the recoil. As this case so readily demonstrates, a eight-year old wasn't capable of controlling it either.

 

[Sonicron]

Remember, controlled does not imply that all free variables have been accounted for (indeed, this is impossible due to quantum randomness), merely that all relevant are accounted for.

Don't come back with "quantum randomness", this is about common sense.
Just because other things can go wrong is no reason to place our kids in unnecessary risks.

The risk wasn't unnecessary by any measure.
The risk of driving in a car to GET to the gun show was FAR higher than this situation, due to the ABUNDANCE of free variables in the uncontrolled car environment (along with its inherent risks) compared to the controlled environments very restricted free variable set.

At what point did common sense abandon your line of thought? This comparison is a joke. Yes, people die from car accidents, but cars are designed to be a mode of transportation, not a tool with which to damage or kill other living beings.
And don't give me the 'guns are a tool for defending yourself' argument, because it is rendered moot by my previous point: guns help you achieve self-defense by damaging or killing.
You can cite laws or spout crap about free variables as much as you like, but the fact remains that the only controlled environment in this already bizarre setting would have been one in which the kid had not been given the damn uzi, because a gun (loaded or not) does NOT belong in the hands of a child!

 

[Gildedtongue]

Meh, overall it's a problem with America's litigation society where "nothing's your fault." The parents of the 8-year-old has some major explaining to do, letting someone that young try to fire off a submachine gun (And this is an Uzi, real Israeli Uzis are big, not hand-sized like the MAC-10). We've got both a 15-year-old handing off a weapon to a younger kid, we've also got, what I'm going to consider the owners of the booth, letting a 15-year-old hand an automatic weapon to an eight-year-old, and if he wasn't at a booth, then why the hell are you letting your kid around some strange teenager with a bunch of guns? No, we've got a cluster of incredibly stupid people who need to be removed from the breeding pool.

But instead, we're going to blame the hunk of metal on the problem. That's right, like we blame an inanimate object for doing something, or better yet, we'll blame "The gun society" for our issues, something that's merely an abstract construct, something that doesn't exist in our life. People seem to completely disregard their own free-will when its convenient to them. Do I blame the 8-year-old? No, he's 8, guns are seen as cool, a source of power, and the worst thing that'll happen when they go off is either someone gets black soot all over their face, or they poof and need a respawn later. The teenager? A bit more blame, certainly, but at the same time, where the hell are his parents? But, in the end, where the hell are the 8-year-old's parents? You're letting someone like that wander around a place with dangerous items, and a whole bunch of people who, obviously, are not exactly the brightest bulbs in the shed (the gun jammed twice according to the article, hey, bub! First time it jammed, I think that's a good sign you ought to put that thing away until you clean it later). But, ah well, the parents are blaming the teen for their bad parenting, and then the larger society blames abstractions because they don't want to think of themselves as being stupid.

Hey, I'm sad the kid's dead, and I'm sorry for the parents, but, you know, someone was a bit stupid here.

 

[Reneux]

wehn comparing spoons to knives to guns you have to remember only one of those is shaped like a penis, and shoots stuff out the front at the time of climax.
Now you see why the idea of a fully automatic one is heinously attractive to these folks. I firmly believe that if we could some how de-inhibit america sexually, and let these folks find good orgasims in fully operational single bars, the need for gun shows would evaporate.

Fondly,

 

[Woem]

There's more information to be found in this related article [http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/11/family_of_christopher_bizijl_s.html].

The details in the court documents show the gun apparently went off when the boy was attempting to keep it from falling after the stock of the weapon slipped down from his shoulder. His father, Dr. Charles D. Bizilj, who brought Christopher and his 11-year-old brother Colin, to the show, had been ordered to remain away from the firing line behind restraining ropes, according to the suit.

?Without further instruction or guidance from the line officer, the decedent placed his fingers on the trigger mechanism of the weapon and attempted to raise the Micro Uzi to his shoulder. The stock of the weapon slipped down from the decedent?s shoulder and the barrel of same spun upward. The decedent attempted to prevent the weapon from falling, and in doing so, the gun spun upward,? according to the complaint.

The gun slipped from his shoulder? Are you kidding me? Why would anyone give a kid a gun he isn't even able to hold? So there was an instructor nearby to keep his family behind the restraining ropes, but he wasn't able to prevent this tragedy? That's just really, really sad.

 

[Inverse Skies]

This is a tragedy which could have easily been avoided with some common sense. It's sad that this poor kid has died, there are so many odd things about this story. The fact his parents thought real guns were appropriate for an eight year old kid, the fact the kid handling the gun was fifteen, none of it seems to make sense. I'm saddened by this.

 

[Kenny Kondom]

Maybe It was just too much CoD MW 1 and 2, and the kid though he could respawn...
Or that the American population is Gun Obsessed to the point of it being Unhealthy...
Or That they are jackasses.
take your pick/add you own suggestion.
Still, i think it morally wrong to take a child to a gun convention, and before anyone makes the argument of 'some museums have guns on show', you will regularly find that they are for display purposes, and usually disarmed and put behind a case. you would not see a kid with a loaded gun in a British museum/convention... but on the other hand, you can do archery in places...
umm... i dunno where my argument has gone, i myself have shot it down...
All in all, you wont be able to erradicate this issue, because A) Americans are adament about it, B) It would be nigh impossible to prevent it all of the time.
Sad really..

 

[Albel Huxley]

Natural selection doing it's work and making the world a safer place.



Thank you dumb parents and ignorant 15 year old gun handler.




PS if i get banned there is no freedom of speech. To many have died to protect it. So deal with it.

 

[orangebandguy]

Unreasonably dangerous? It's an UZI for Christ's sake. The only thing that's unreasonable he is their stupidity.

I'll never understand the mindset of trigger happy Americans.

 

[clericwithnolife31]

I'm glad to see that we've moved on from the early 2000's, since the family isn't sueing the gun owners, for every penny their worth. *Rages at the heavens*. Least the kid went out more spectacularly then kurt cobain

 

[Albel Huxley]

how true valid point.

Spoken like a true hippy

 

[Woem]

I'm glad to see that we've moved on from the early 2000's, since the family isn't sueing the gun owners, for every penny their worth. *Rages at the heavens*. Least the kid went out more spectacularly then kurt cobain

Well there is currently a $4 million lawsuit for involuntary manslaughter.

 

[Cherry Cola]

Hahhaha, hilarious! Doubly hilarious with some of the commentary here!

Why not go to a gun show?
How is an art exhibit any more or less wrong for an 8 year old, considering guns kill far less children then the bus he had to take every day of his life?

This was a hilarious tragedy which is made even more hilarious because it will provoke people who don't think logically to say "well gosh, if only he hadn't been allowed near guns"!

Yes, guns are terrible instruments of life and death, but when we live in a world where the car is far more of a blood god than anything actually designed for destruction, the rules may just be a bit different from what your intuition tells you.

tl;dr: this wasn't sad or tragic at all.

how often does a fifteen year old bus driver turn the wheel over to an 8 year old?

That's what happens when you name your kid Bizilj.

...

Bizilj is their last name.

Again, according to child psychology, an eight year old can fully understand the consequences to potentially the same degree as the 15 year old (many 15 year olds are still in the concrete stage). Which sort of undermines your argument.

Not to mention, it was a controlled environment. You could have had a 2 year old shoot it with the same amount of risk as an 80 year old.

No, you absolutely couldn't, because a two-year old isn't strong enough to carry the weight of the weapon, let alone control the recoil. As this case so readily demonstrates, a eight-year old wasn't capable of controlling it either.

I still think it's a stupid name.

And the 8 year old could fire the gun. Maybe he couldn't control it, but shooting with it was easy. Just because you can't control a weapon doesn't mean that you can't use it. There is always a risk when it comes to weapons, and it doesn't matter who wields it, the risk will still be there.

 

[cobra_ky]

Again, according to child psychology, an eight year old can fully understand the consequences to potentially the same degree as the 15 year old (many 15 year olds are still in the concrete stage). Which sort of undermines your argument.

Not to mention, it was a controlled environment. You could have had a 2 year old shoot it with the same amount of risk as an 80 year old.

No, you absolutely couldn't, because a two-year old isn't strong enough to carry the weight of the weapon, let alone control the recoil. As this case so readily demonstrates, a eight-year old wasn't capable of controlling it either.

Sure a 2 year old is, with proper help.

what kind of help, a cyborg body? you're either a troll or certifiably insane.

PS if i get banned there is no freedom of speech. To many have died to protect it. So deal with it.

Welcome to the Escapist. Come back when you learn what freedom of speech means.